Electronic mail (email) has become an integral part of business and personal communications. As such, many users have multiple email accounts for work and home use. Moreover, with the increased availability of mobile cellular and wireless local area network (LAN) devices that can send and receive emails, many users wirelessly access emails from mailboxes stored on different email storage servers (e.g., corporate email storage server, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc.).
Yet, email distribution and synchronization across multiple mailboxes and over wireless networks can be quite challenging, particularly when this is done on a large scale for numerous users. For example, different email accounts may be configured differently and with non-uniform access criteria. Moreover, as emails are received at the wireless communications device, copies of the emails may still be present in the original mailboxes, which can make it difficult for users to keep their email organized.
The foregoing system usefully provides great convenience to users of wireless email communication devices for organizing and managing their email messages. Yet, further convenience and efficiency features may be desired in email distribution and synchronization systems as email usage continues to grow in popularity. For example, in new user accounts, an email provisioning and authentication system can run through a series of possible email server configurations to determine how to access an electronic mailbox for a user email account. The user can supply email address parameters such as an email address and password, but often becomes frustrated if the wrong email address parameter is typed. The user typically must wait a relatively long time to determine if something is wrong, or worse, the user may be given an advanced configuration screen and asked to provide difficult to know IP address numbers, ports and other entries because of the mistake. Some prior art systems have parsed emails and tried to provision, and as a subsequent step after failure, used MX records to aid in the process for accessing email.
In prior approaches, a system may run through a series of possible email server configurations to determine access to a source mailbox. For example, if a user provided an email address of Sally@somedomain.com, the system would try a series of possible server domain names, for example, mail.somedomain.com, pop.somedomain.com, etc. until the system finds one that works. If the system goes through the entire list of possibilities to validate an account, this can result in significant delays. Also, with the increase in “vanity” domains, using the ending of the email address might not lead to the actual server where the account is hosted. In addition, certain email actually resolves to other service provider email systems, e.g., a Verizon.com addresses resolved to mail.yahoo.com. Thus, such approaches may not always find the appropriate address of the mail server, and the user may have to wait a significant time while this process takes place only to have the process fail in the end.
United States Patent Application 2007/0073818 to Gardner et al. (which is assigned to the present Assignee) entitled “System and method for provisioning an email account using mail exchange records” discloses a system that provisions an electronic mail (email) account of a user for allowing access to an electronic mailbox from a remote device to retrieve email. A communications module receives email address parameters of the user and transmits a domain name system (DNS) query to the Internet for returning mail exchange (MX) records corresponding to the email address parameters of the user. A configuration module processes any returned MX records as a starting point for determining configuration parameters for accessing the email account of the user to retrieve user email.
Also, United States Patent Application 2007/0073819 to Gardner et al. (which is also assigned to the present Assignee) entitled “System and method for provisioning an email account using mail exchange and address records” teaches the use of a system for provisioning an electronic mail (email) account of a user for allowing access to an electronic mailbox from a remote device to retrieve email. A communications module receives email address parameters entered by the user and transmits a domain name system (DNS) query to the Internet for returning mail exchange (MX) and address (A) records corresponding to the entered email address parameters of the user. A configuration module processes any returned MX and A records to determine whether the email address parameters entered by the user are valid before attempting to provision the email account of the user.